John Graham, chief executive at the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board, pictured in 2022.Sean Kilpatrick/The Canadian Press
The Canada Pension Plan Investment Board’s chief executive officer is expecting global economic growth to be lower this year amid a “roller-coaster” period for markets that has caused investors to “sit on their hands” while they wait to see what comes next.
The year so far has been “a wild ride,” John Graham said, as a weaker first quarter undercut an otherwise strong fiscal year for Canada’s largest pension fund manager. CPPIB reported a 9.3-per-cent return over the 12 months that ended March 31, just as surging stocks started to whipsaw through a turbulent period caused by tariffs and trade disputes.
Major pension funds have faced a challenging and volatile investing environment for years, in large part because of high inflation and elevated interest rates related to the COVID-19 pandemic. Just as the market was finding its footing, tariffs have upended investors’ assumptions and brought fresh waves of uncertainty.
“It’s like being on a roller coaster. We’ve been spun around, upside down, and it seems like we’re back where we started,” Mr. Graham said in an interview on Wednesday.
“But we’re still strapped in, and I think everyone expects that there’s going to be a few more rounds of this as no one really has a great sense of where things are going to land.”
The good news for CPPIB, Mr. Graham said, is that it is an investment “supertanker” with a portfolio that is designed to be resilient.
“We don’t try to oversteer it,” he said. “Even in times when there is uncertainty, you can still find good investments.”
Total assets managed by CPPIB increased to $714.4-billion in the fiscal year, from $632.3-billion a year earlier, according to financial results released Wednesday. The fund added $59.8-billion of investment income and about $22-billion of new contributions from members of the Canada Pension Plan, the primary national retirement program for working Canadians.
The CPPIB’s returns underperformed a new benchmark by 1.6 percentage points in the fiscal year. The pension fund manager revamped the benchmark it uses to measure performance last year, aggregating internal targets that are set for its investing teams, to better reflect the breadth of its portfolio.
In the 2024 calendar year that ended Dec. 31, CPPIB earned a 14.2-per-cent return, trailing a benchmark return of 15.1 per cent.
“I think it was a really strong year for the fund,” Mr. Graham said.
CPPIB manages and invests the Canada Pension Plan’s funds on behalf of about 22 million plan members.
The calendar-year returns CPPIB had in 2025 exceeded the gains reported by several other major Canadian pension funds: the Caisse de dépôt et placement du Quebec and Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan each earned 9.4 per cent last year, Alberta Investment Management Corp. gained 12.6 per cent, and Ontario Municipal Employees Retirement System (OMERS) was up 8.3 per cent.
Over the past 10 years, CPPIB has earned an average annual return of 8.3 per cent, outperforming its revised benchmark by 1.4 percentage points.
Looking ahead, “the expectation of global growth is lower because of this level of uncertainty,” Mr. Graham said. And while CPPIB invests around the world – with nearly 60 per cent of its assets in the U.S. and Canada, and the rest in Europe, Asia and Latin America – “there’s no safe harbour there. Really, all countries are going to take some reduction in growth going forward.”
Some investors are rethinking their exposure to the United States, but Mr. Graham said CPPIB is comfortable with the assets it has in the country, which now make up 47 per cent of CPPIB’s total portfolio. That was up from 42 per cent a year ago, mostly because of investment gains and foreign-currency effects.
Even so, global investment markets are shifting into a new mindset “where instead of growing the pie, the world’s moving into a splitting-the-pie mode,” he said. “Longer term, that’s not great.”
“You’ve got to zoom out and think about the investable universe from a global basis, where you want to have your capital, where you want to invest,” he added.
The CPPIB’s portfolio of publicly traded stocks gained 10.6 per cent last year, while its private equity investments earned 11.8 per cent. The strongest gains came from the pension fund manager’s credit portfolio, which gained 14.4 per cent, aided by a strong U.S. dollar.
All of the asset classes in CPPIB’s portfolio had positive returns in the last fiscal year, including real estate, which gained 3.8 per cent.
After a difficult stretch, particularly for office and retail properties, “I think real estate has kind of caught its footing,” Mr. Graham said.
Editor’s note: A previous version of this article incorrectly stated that Alberta Investment Management Corp. gained 13.4 per cent last year. It gained 12.6 per cent. This version has been corrected.